WORCESTER — Tuition and fees at the University of Massachusetts will increase by an average of 5.8 percent for the next academic year after an 11-2 vote by the board of trustees Thursday.
Tuition is rising for the second straight year, after a 5 percent increase in the 2015-16 academic year.
According to UMass President Martin T. Meehan, the latest increases will cost an average of $756 for in-state undergraduate students across four of the university’s five campuses — Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth and Lowell.
Undergraduate students attending the Amherst campus will see the largest tuition hike, at $800 per student. According to the university, the in-state undergraduate tuition and room and board costs on the Amherst campus will increase by $1,194 — or 4.65 percent — from $25,674 last year to $26,868 in 2016-17.
“The increase is consistent with all of the other public universities in Massachusetts,” Meehan said after the meeting. “But on the other hand, we have to continue to work and fight as hard as we can to get more from the state and also we have to continue looking for efficiencies to try to find other areas where we can cut.”
When taking added financial aid into account, Meehan said the net increase is approximately 3.2 percent for undergraduate students across the four campuses. Meehan said he hopes the university will expand internship and co-op programs to help students earn income in their field of study.
UMass Amherst Student Government Association spokesman Tyler O’Day said Thursday night the tuition and fees increase indicates a flawed state budget and will put a burden on working-class families already struggling to afford higher education.
“Budgets are moral documents. This is an unacceptable place to be as a commonwealth,” O’Day said. “And we can’t cut our way to prosperity.”
The state appropriated $508 million for the university in the fiscal year which began July 1. The appropriation, up 1.5 percent from the last fiscal year, is $88 million less than the $596 million the university requested, UMass spokesman Robert P. Connolly told the Gazette in June.
But, taking into account a $10.9 million supplemental appropriation April 1, the university is facing a $3.4 million reduction in its state appropriation for the current fiscal year, according to Connolly.The tuition increase is expected to generate $30.3 million in total revenue, and a quarter of the revenue will be redirected to financial aid, leaving $22.8 million in net revenue, the statement said.
The net revenue will be part of a two-pronged approach to closing an $85 million shortfall and rebalancing the university budget, according to the statement. Spending reductions and efficiencies worth $65 million through staff reductions, hiring freezes and administrative restructuring will also help close the gap, the statement said.
UMass Amherst Student Government Association President Anthony Vitale, who attended the meeting, said his organization is in the early stages of planning an event next spring to have a “real adult discussion about the cost of higher education funding.”
As a way to advocate for more state funding, Vitale said the Student Government Association plans to invite political leaders from across the state to the Amherst campus to see firsthand how funding public higher education benefits the commonwealth.
“It is kind of disheartening to see there wasn’t anything that was able to be done in this budget cycle that could’ve counteracted (the increase). This is something that we need to learn from and build off of in the future,” Vitale said.
“We do need to look into and really aggressively push for more state funding as well as look into continuing cuts. I know the university has made tremendous cuts already … but I think we need to continue that.”
Senate President Stanley Rosenberg, D-Amherst, said in a statement issued Thursday evening, “Providing affordable, quality higher education for Massachusetts students helps Massachusetts employers and grows the economy. The Senate will continue to work to find ways to grow our economy, and increase our revenue to provide more state funding to UMass, so that we do not have to see these kinds of increases in the future.”
UMass Amherst spokesman Daniel Fitzgibbons said the 1.5 percent increase in funding from the state represents a 2 percent decrease in funding for the Amherst campus, the largest in the university system, when weighed against costs that go up every year.
“Eight hundred dollars is what we need to preserve academic excellence and keep the forward momentum of the campus going,” Fitzgibbons said Thursday night. “It’s the biggest campus with double the number of students as the next largest campus.”
UMass Lowell, the next largest campus, had 10,154 undergraduate students enrolled in fall 2014, according to its website, and will have a $780 tuition and fees increase for the coming academic year. For comparison, UMass Amherst had 22,000 undergraduate students enrolled in fall 2013, according to its website.
During Thursday’s special meeting at the UMass Medical School, trustees pointed to the lower funding from the state than the university requested, a 3.5 percent increase in costs such as health care for employees through collective bargaining and the demands of debt from capital building projects in the past five years across the campuses.
“When you have a 3.5 percent increase in collective bargaining every year, you’re going to have a 3.5 percent increase every year,” trustees Chairman Victor Woolridge said after the meeting. “We have arrived at the mountaintop of debt … and state revenue sources are sinking.”
“This is another pivot point in our journey of continued efforts to meet our mission to the commonwealth,” Woolridge added.
According to Woolridge, the university has reached a point where it must “digest the debt” from capital building projects to improve the university with state-of-the-art buildings across the campuses over the past five years. During the meeting, Meehan said the investments were vital to boosting the university’s reputation.
“Consider what UMass would be if we hadn’t. I know what Lowell would be — probably out of business,” said Meehan, the former chancellor of UMass Lowell. “Amherst wouldn’t be 29th in the country among public universities.”
But not all trustees agreed that the university was as fiscally conservative as it could have been when planning the budget for the current year. Ex-officio trustee and Massachusetts Secretary of Education James A. Peyser voted against raising tuition, saying some line items on the budget were “out of line.”
According to Peyser, spending will exceed revenue under the new budget, which includes staffing he believes the university cannot fully afford.
“We could do a little better,” Peyser said. “The university has gone a long way … but not far enough.”
In response, trustee Edward W. Collins Jr. said Peyser’s comments struck him as “political grandstanding” and said he thought those who disagreed with raising tuition and fees and planned to vote against the proposed budget should suggest their ideas for solutions.
O’Day, a rising senior at UMass Amherst, said his younger brother will join him at the flagship campus this fall. The tuition and fees increase for two undergraduate students will cost his family an additional $1,600, O’Day said, at a point where his family members have already taken multiple jobs to help meet their financial needs.
O’Day said he also anticipates a financial strain on his peers working minimum wage jobs at $10 an hour to fund their education.
“For kids who are already working, that’s another 80 hours of work they have to find. For kids that already work from when college gets out to Labor Day weekend, that’s a tough place to put (them) in,” O’Day said.
After the meeting, Woolridge said it was a difficult vote to make when considering the students who will bear the burden of the cost increases.
“I understand that. I was one of them, I starved on the weekends … I’m very sympathetic to the students,” he said. “But at the same time, you can’t sacrifice the institution. It’s a tough position to be in.”
Meehan also looked back upon his days as an undergraduate student. He graduated from UMass Lowell at a time where state funding outweighed the cost of tuition, lessening the burden on students.
“I’m never happy (raising tuition and fees) … I’m an alum,” Meehan said. “I graduated from this institution at a time where I could work summers and weekends and pay for the cost.
“It’s one of the reasons why I hope that the presidential campaign produces a public policywith regard to universities and lowering the debt of students … like the one Hillary Clinton has proposed. That could be a start.”